Friday, February 4, 2011

REVIEW: Bill Long and Kaori Hamura at Gallery in the Woods in Brattleboro

The Art of Bill Long and Kaori Hamura

By Jamis Lott

Modern art has reached the point where the need for a new movement and style is long overdue. One particular style that is becoming more accepted in galleries and has gained popularity, especially with the younger crowds, is illustrative and “cartoony” compositions. A pair of artists that base their style in such arts is Bill Long and Kaori Hamura. Both work in animation, production design, web design, character design, poster and CD jacket design and, hopefully very soon, illustration for children’s books. Their styles also have no trouble being displayed in the gallery setting, as is evident from their work on display in Brattleboro’s Gallery in the Woods.

Over the numerous years that Bill Long has exhibited in Brattleboro, he has stayed faithful to the content of his work and has found no need for improvement. His paintings always have at least one occupant. One of Bill Long’s series consists of an array of fictional birds roosting and soaring, but the majority of his paintings feature a race of people colored in highly saturated purple or green. Lanky limbed and bulbous headed, these characters go about their lives- they boil violet crabs for dinner, peek out of bubbly baths, haul baskets of fruit, play guitar, and pause as though they are seeing what the viewer sees and are contemplating their own realities. These characters also seem to function as hosts for the viewers and invite us into the rest of the painting.

Always in one point perspective, the paintings take place in cupolas, barn lofts, birdhouses, and seaside restaurants. These abodes are detailed with props and furnishings that add hominess to each setting. An opening centered in the middle of each composition reveals a cutesy world beyond the room the viewer starts from. Through the window, porthole, or gap, the view expands into spacious sky, ocean, and countryside. Each painting gives off the sense of a world within that is as boundless as our own.

The scenes are soaked in high saturation and the chosen layout of colors results in an overdose of visual stimulation. Dark red hair flows down a girl’s light green skin, and a soft pink sky is the background for a cluster of trees with deep violet foliage. As these examples show, opposites in hue and value have no trouble sharing borders. The application of paint is soft and hazy and adds to the dreamy nature of the work. Bill Long ends up crafting a place that involves viewers, as well as invites them to enter a reality as alluring as a dream.

Kaori Hamura has the same devotion to creating animated and charming visuals as Bill Long does, except with a different approach. Hamura’s displayed work, a collection of illustrations from her still-to-be published book Dream Seasons, is designed with the new-aged Japanese style of cutsey creatures with stubby statures and puppy dog eyes. Her work also exhibits visual kinetic energy that makes for a compelling composition.

Dream Seasons follows the travels of a little girl in a purple and plaid pull-over, and her collection of friends including a couple of beady-eyed bunnies, designed with the same simple structure and consistency as a Sunday comic character. Like the series’ title implies, Hamura’s “Dream Seasons” is fashioned from the experience one could have while venturing through a shifting dreamscape.

The surroundings in the story change dramatically, from calm blue skies and winding rivers, to raging tidal waves and downpours that act as the antagonist within the story. The colors are softer in tone and much less vivid than Bill Long’s palette. The environments are the dominant details in the series, dwarfing the little girl and her bunny friends, with dynamic use of color, shape and current. Thick outlines encompass every character, ensuring that no figure is lost within the epic backdrop. When applied to objects like mountains, waves and stars, the outlines turn these elements into unmistakable icons. Contorted tree trunks, overly winding roads and mountains that mimic Hiroshige’s “Mt. Fuji” make for imagery that is very easy to remember. The flow of the landscapes is consistent, as when mountaintops and trees mimic the fluffy clouds they ascend up to, and when bubbles floating in the sky pick up where bubbling waves leave off. Throughout each piece and each feature within, there is bonding and pulling, friction and coming together. With the use of an overly jagged wave, or a sky and field whose textures seem conjoined, Hamura makes obvious the disposition and energy of the world that she has created.

To see other creations by Kaori Hamura and Bill Long, visit their web site at mossmoon.com

About Vermont Art Zine

Vermont Art Zineprovides writeups and reviews of Vermont exhibitions great and small, publishes essays on a range of matters of interest to our visual arts community, and posts links to art resources, portfolios, and blogs by Vermont artists and others (see below). We hope to broaden the range of venues and artists under general discussion with the goal of fostering greater aesthetic awareness, stronger support for the visual arts, and the creation of a critical community in Vermont, for Vermont.

Vermont Art Zineencourages contributions from Vermont art critics and reviewers, as well as unsolicited contributions on topics in the visual arts from a diverse range of artists’ voices from around the Green Mountain State.

Follow us on Facebook

Our facebook page is updated frequently with headlines and images. Please COMMENT and discuss what's happening on VAZ and in the visual arts community! Post your own news and links!

How to submit a PRESS RELEASE

We'd love to post your venue's press release. Please send us a prose paragraph of text about the exhibition/event AND one or more jpeg images. Please DO NOT send just an electronic exhibition card. We reserve the right to decline inadequate press releases.

WRITE FOR VERMONT ART ZINE!

We want Vermont Art Zine to be a commons for our Vermont visual arts community, with information and pictures about shows, artists, and venues around the state. To make that happen, we need artist/writer participation from many, many different voices in many different places in Vermont.

Do you have ideas about issues and hot-button topics in the visual arts? We post questions for response and debate. Let us hear from you!

Write to us at vermontartzine@gmail.com

How To Add Your Link

If you're a Vermont artist or a visual arts presenter, we'd be happy to list your website or blog (one of each) in our LINKS. Send your link to vermontartzine@gmail.com. If you'd put up a reciprocal link, that would be great!

Appreciators

Blog Listing Policy

Vermont Art Zine offers to link to one blog per Vermont artist. Send your request to the addresses above. We reserve the right to remove blogs from this list if they have been without a new post for 6 months. If you use your blog more as a website (that is, you put it up and then more or less leave it, with just occasional updates), ask us to list it under VT Artists instead.

Vermont Artists Listing Policy

We will be happy to link to one website for each Vermont artist. If you have a website and a blog, we will link to one of each. A Vermont artist is someone who resides in the state for more than half the year. Artist websites should be about the visual artwork of the artist. It's OK to sell through your site, but it should be your own work.